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A Tale of Two Strikes: Moralities of Kurdish Struggle and Municipal Labor Politics in Turkey’s Kurdistan
Abstract
2013 in Turkey’s Kurdistan. It was the year when the Turkish state and Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish movement, started “Peace Negotiations,” raising hopes for an end to the decades-long “low intensity” war – a war, which demanded over forty thousand lives, thousands of evacuated villages, millions of forcibly displaced Kurdish peasants, now living in over-populated cities reined by poverty and the lack of means of livelihood. 2013 was a year when “memories” of the war and struggle were still vivid, as they kept recurring in familiar forms: new extra-judicial killings of prominent Kurdish figures in France; resistance to internationally facilitated atrocities in Syrian Kurdistan; deadly protests against ongoing construction of high-security military bases on Kurdish mountains; and struggles and anguish of thousands of Kurdish political prisoners. 2013 was also a year of deep ambivalence about what is expecting the ones who have “paid the price” of revolting against the Turkish state. In the midst of this ambivalence, in January and July 2013, two strikes were “silently” held by municipality contract workers in Van and Diyarbakir, two major cities of Turkey's Kurdistan today. Tracing the events and debates around these two separate strikes, this paper explores the politico-moral tensions evoked by Kurdish workers’ pursuit of socio-economic claims from Kurdish legal party-controlled municipalities. In so doing, this paper reads everyday economic struggles, worries and expectations of Kurdish municipality workers at the present vis-à-vis an ongoing history of Kurdish struggles and accompanying moralities they have engendered. The last two decades have witnessed Kurdish political parties’ gaining control of some major municipal governments in the region. Paradoxically linking the Kurdish struggle to formal administrative structures of the Turkish state, these municipalities opened up a novel space for the mediation of contradictory politico-moral visions of agency, rights, responsibilities and principles of personal conduct. Primarily based on the data I collected during my 18 month-long ethnographic research in Diyarbakir and Van, this paper examines these uneasy mediations through tracing two labor strikes - where different actors divergently appropriated moralities of Kurdish struggle, in their efforts to either mobilize or demobilize Kurdish municipality workers’ pursuit of socio-economic claims. As such, the paper offers an analysis of ordinary struggles in Turkey’s Kurdistan, which complicates the assumed dichotomies between the Kurds vs. the state, moral economy of the subaltern vs. amoral capitalist economy.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Kurdistan
Sub Area
Political Economy